No one can discuss intelligently the question of political morality if he ignores the effect of this struggle between the old system of minority domination and the new system of majority rule. And yet scarcely ever do our text-books or magazine articles dealing with present political evils even so much as allude to this most important fact--the one, indeed, on which hinges our whole system of business fraud and political corruption. We often hear the opinion expressed by people of more than ordinary intelligence that the public immorality so much in evidence in this country is the natural and inevitable result of popular government. This view is industriously encouraged by the conservative and even accepted by not a few of those whose sympathies are with democracy. Yet no conclusion could be more erroneous. It would be just as logical to attribute the religious persecutions of the Middle Ages to the growth of religious dissent. If there had been no dissenters, there would have been no persecution; neither would there have been any reformation or any progress toward a system of religious liberty. Persecution was the means employed to repress dissent and defeat the end which the dissenters had in view. Corruption sustains exactly the same relation to the democratic movement of modern times. It has been employed, not to promote, but to defeat the ends of popular government. No intelligent person should any longer be in doubt as to the real source of corruption. It is to be eradicated, not by placing additional restrictions on the power of the people, but by removing those political restraints upon the majority which now preclude any effective popular control of public officials. We forget that when our government was established the principle of majority rule was nowhere recognized--that until well along into the nineteenth century the majority of our forefathers did not even have the right to vote. The minority governed under the sanction of the Constitution and the law of the land. Then a great popular movement swept over the country, and in the political upheaval which followed, the masses secured the right of suffrage. But universal suffrage, though essential to, does not ensure popular government. The right to vote for some, or even all, public officials, does not necessarily involve any effective control over such officials by, or any real responsibility to, the majority of the voters. Nor is any constitutional system set up to achieve the purpose of minority rule likely to contain those provisions which are necessary for the enforcement of public opinion in the management of political affairs. It was thought by the masses, of course, when they acquired the suffrage that they acquired the substance of political power. Their expectation, however, was but partially realized. Indirect election, official independence, and the rigidity of the constitutional system as a whole, with its lack of responsiveness to popular demands, largely counteracted the results expected from universal suffrage. But the extension of the suffrage to the masses, though having much less direct and immediate influence upon the policy of the state than is generally supposed, was in one respect supremely important. In popular thought it worked a transformation in the form of the government. The old view which recognized the political supremacy of the minority was now largely superseded by the new view that the will of the majority ought to be the supreme law of the land.